Hello, you are listening to the Secular Buddhism Podcast and this is episode number 41.

I am your host Noah Rasheda and today I'm talking about life on the Buddhist Path.

Today I want to talk a little bit about what it means to be a Buddhist, especially in the secular sense.

What is life on the Buddhist path? As a listener you might be someone who is interested in deepening your mindfulness practice.

Is there a process by which one becomes a Buddhist? What does that even mean? How does this apply to a secular Buddhist path?

If that's you a listener who wants to take that next step, this podcast episode will discuss a little bit about what life on the Buddhist path entails.

In most Buddhist traditions there is a process by which one kind of becomes an adherent to this path or this way of life.

So I want to address that a little bit specifically because I've recently gone through this on my own.

I've been studying and teaching Buddhism for many years now but I recently graduated just this weekend.

I've been doing a ministry program with a Japanese school of Buddhism that was based out of Chicago and now it's in California and they have like an American secularized style of Buddhism that kind of infuses several different traditions.

That's where I've been studying for years now. This graduation ceremony is what allows me to officially be a Buddhist minister now which would allow me to officiate at weddings or funerals or any of the ritualistic aspects of Buddhism.

I find this pretty fascinating at the intersection of being approaching Buddhism from a secular lens because Buddhism itself is already so secular in nature, it's a non-theistic tradition and yet there are rituals and aspects of it that can feel quite religious.

So I wanted to address that a little bit with regards to this topic of what is life like on this Buddhist path, on the secular Buddhist path.

And remember as I mentioned with every podcast you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist, you just use it to be a better whatever you already are.

Some people, their spiritual path that they're interested in is the Buddhist path, the secular Buddhist path. So I want to talk about that a little bit today.

So in typical traditions, with typical schools of Buddhism, the process by which one would become a Buddhist and I'm using air quotes here when I say that is that you take refuge.

It's called taking refuge and you take refuge in three things. You take refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma and in the Sangha.

So I want to explain that a little bit. But first of all let's just look at this word refuge for a second because refuge is like safety or comfort or another word that I think does a good job of explaining this idea of refuge is anchoring ourselves, anchor.

And what we're anchoring ourselves to are values. And I think this is an important thing because in the Buddhist tradition, it's values that we're trying to anchor to not necessarily beliefs.

Buddhism is not a dogmatic religion or spiritual path, or at least shouldn't be.

So to take refuge in the Buddha, for example, what that means, I've mentioned in previous podcast, the podcast on Enlightenment that the word Buddha means awakened one.

So what we're taking refuge in is in this idea of wisdom into the possibility, I anchor myself to the possibility of being awake, of being awakened myself.

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